Who Taught You Octagon?

This title is from a Chris Rock skit. You've probably seen it. If not, check for it on his most recent DVD. It's become a recurring joke at my job for over a year now. It's even funnier to me b/c my daughter Nia, who's going on 3, knows her shapes, including the infamous octagon. She has this toy that teaches colors, letters, numbers, and shapes, and one of the things to identify is an octagon, in the form of a bright red stop sign. Ask her what it is, and she's quick to tell you - "oct-o-gon."

It's amazing to me to watch her learn. At this age, it's mostly repitition and pattern-matching, so she doesn't have a deep understanding of the words and meanings. So for her, saying "octagon" doesn't bring up any connection to an 8-sided figure, the latin (it is latin, right?) root "octo," the "gon" ending in shapes (pentagon, hexagon, etc), or stuff like that. She just knows that the stop sign is called octagon. This took me on one of my occasionally deep mental trips, thinking about the many words that we use daily, with a similar lack of understanding, history, and context. For many of us, even our very names are just a combination of letters without a personal meaning. We taught a very basic etymology class in Saturday School the past 2 years, and it's always amazing to me to discover where words come from, what they mean, what language they're derived, and what other words they're connected to. Maybe this is the kind of thing that only a writer can really get into... and honestly, I don't have nearly the time it would take to explore it too deep. But words themselves have a story, and perhaps understanding those stories can better help us understand more about the way the wor(l)d works.